Alternatives to the High Cost of Health Care in the USA Without the Government's Role

Real Alternatives to the High Cost of Health Care in the USA Without the Government's Role Yahoo Contributor Network . There is a lot of statistical information going around talking about how The Germans and the French only pay 7-9 percent of their gross national product to health care and the big bad USA is spending as much or more than 15 percent. Others are suggesting that Cuba's low cost total care program is the way to go. The reality is these figures are generally meaningless. Germany and France do not have anywhere near the percentage of the taxes collected going to pay for worldwide military operations the USA pays for. Where as these countries might seem to have lower percentages going to health care they also maybe collecting much higher overall taxes. Taxes compound and intersect and hit individuals and businesses harder than the simple rates that you can find in the statistical data. Looking at Germany, They have a top income tax, before Obama of about the same 38 percent level the USA had but on top of that they have a VAT tax from 19 to 50 percent and a separate Vat tax on agricultural products of about 7 percent and that does not necessarily include enormous taxes on gasoline/diesel fuel as in much of Europe a gallon of gas costs 6 -12 dollars a gallon which is priced similarly to cigarettes in this country where the biggest percentage of the price is the taxes. Add on to this inheritance taxes of 19-50 percent and then local taxes on top of that in Germany and Wow! Their low cost health care is what percentage of what total rate of taxation? Not all of these figures are exactly correct and some maybe completely wrong. The point of this article is just to give the reader a little more objective reading of the actual situation. German and French , British and other health care systems have hidden costs that government statistics offices are leaving out of their statistical assessments. If it costs you Six bucks for a gallon of gasoline and then you have to pay a road toll on top of that and you have to pay a 3.5 percent tax to sell your home in Germany, The goverment has you coming and going at the same time. Which expenditure is which then and how are you sure that the real cost of health care is somehow lower than in the USA? You can't be. You also cannot be sure that the benefits are better. In Germany there is a mostly homogeneous population , unlike the USA, we have a rift between rich and poor you do not see in Germany. The Slum dwellers in parts of the USA have a much lower life expectancy because they maybe shooting at each other more often or because they are getting hopelessly overweight thanks to the ready availability of food stamps and other welfare handouts. Someone said that the USA is the only country in the world where are poor are fanatically obese and overweight. Now wait a minute, isn't the Obama administration talking about the need for government to make people healthy before they need to go to the hospital with wellness programs such as those to reduce their weight? Well he already can make an executive decision to limit what foods food stamp money can buy maybe starting with skim milk verses whole and eliminating meat and eggs for those who should be thankful for what ever they get? That is just one secret solution to the so called health care mess. The divide between rich and poor in the USA is nothing like the complete of sympathy for the mentally IL in this country which our survival of the fittest welfare system that Obama and company support, keeps them homeless and living on our urban streets. These street people are alcoholics and drug abusers and they also add to the lower overall statistically Lower US life expectancy rates compared to other countries. In some European countries and Cuba , euthanasia can be counted as a natural death in the statistics. In a place like North Korea hundreds of thousands of people in concentration camps just cease to exist in the national census the way they do in Cuba. This point about the statistics being meaningless is just to drive home the point that comparisons cannot necessarily be made as simply as some of our politicians and wanna be health planners are telling us. Here are basic ideas that can make the US Health care system work better and more efficiently: Make more goods and services tax free. Why should our government take a cut of your health care dollars any more than your state should charge you a sales tax to buy basic necessities? The government can fix the basic tax free rate and anything charged over that by corporations, hospitals doctors should be taxable at least then a non profit tax free organization (which was the origin of the blue cross systems) could then actually offer some tax free services to help cut down on the necessary premiums charged. Politicians seem to all want their cut from your health care dollars. The idea is off the table even in the McCain Tax Credit which essentially protects the government's seat at the operating table. What about Mexican worker we import for good reasons? Everyone in Los Angeles knows the city shuts down if the Mexican nationals all go back across the border. Why not allow Mexican doctors to cross the border and set up clinics as US / Mexican government contractors? Mexico and even Cuba have a surplus of doctors ready and willing to come and if their services prove as good and cheap as expected then maybe they could admit American nationals to the same clinics to take some of the pressure off the so called existing system. If we can hire Cuban or Mexican doctors for $2000 a month it is a bargain for everyone concerned and a lot cheaper than the once proposed Obama public option that now appears to be dropped. Americans also have to get in the business of outsourcing care which they already are with "medical tourism". A heart bypass in The US can cost $100,000 and in Panama just $10,000 in a state of the art hospital as good as most in the USA and you might even get a US trained doctor down there. If you need an elective face lift that no insurance company should even be forced to pay for as health care except in case of accidents or birth defects then why not go to India and have it done for less than $5000 instead of paying $15,000 in the USA. For gastric bypass surgery you can go to Bangkok , Thailand and have it done for less than $9000 in a state of the art hospital instead of paying more than $30,000 here. Your insurance company should be willing to give you a lower monthly rate and a lower deductible if you are willing in some cases to get on a plane and fly somewhere else to help their plan save money for all participants. Some insurance company should start an airline insurance program so the necessary flight is already paid for to get an emergency seat on a hospital plane flight. There should be a hospital flight airline operating in this country because health care is not about nationalism or about supporting a union any union of health care professionals here it is about your personal individual health and you wanting your insurance company to charge you much lower premiums. Already a lot of people are electing with their own money, not insurance money for medical tourism. Warning: congress and the Obama administration probably don't like this idea and will if they can construct a Berlin wall to make universal care possible the same way they are against voucher systems for public schools to give students and parents free choice in the mater of where they send the tax money they pay to send their kids to reasonable schools of choice and not just schools they are assigned to. The public schools system in this country sees the tax base payers as their captives instead of giving them as much choice as possible which as we all know is ruining the education for millions in this country. It is easy to find medical tourism information online by googling that term and comparing services and prices around the world. Any one without health insurance should probably consider this first before seeking health care locally and being forced to pay absurd rates designed to get the most out of the Medicare system and insurance companies as well as to pay for those without insurance who crash the system frequently. Freedom to choose is the way to go if you really want to get the costs down. Free Medical care for a lot of people in this country is going to be necessary but that does not mean that government cannot charge a monthly fee for these services to those who get them and even to illegal aliens who partake of free US health care services. Governments need pot holes in roads filled and they should be able to take public service hours in exchange for payment of services for those who absolutely can not make an ongoing $50-$100 a month cash or garnished wage payment for medical services already received till the cost above the subsidy is paid off. Do you hear any politicians really talking about getting the welfare class to do some work in exchange for medical care? NO you hear about idiot americorp and ACORN and you hear about Obama wanting to force you to do community service when you already pay over 30-40 percent of your income in taxes! It is absolutely bizarre thinking. Obama says I'm not a communist and i'm not a socialist but his each according to his need redistribution plan is that the poor never have to do any work of any kind to get their benefits. That changed a little bit on paper under Bill Clinton but not really. The system creates professional single mothers as we all know it does who milk the system as long as they can just by getting pregnant as frequently as necessary to keep the payments coming. That whole system is proving unhealthy for children which makes one wonder why reform of that system is not on the table for reformation in congress and by the administration? Listen carefully and you will understand that the whole universal health care dream of the democrats is really about making everyone in the country a welfare case for government administrators to plan for and yet simple reforms to prevent the institution of single motherhood for welfare is no where near the chopping block but we do hear about how Medicare and Medicaid will be replaced with a plan that actually expands those programs sets in place rationing and does everything to protect the single mother welfare system except the government keeps quiet about their secret plans to introduce mandatory abortion at some point because they do know that in spite of this constituency that government cannot go on paying for it in any sustainable manner. Everything just said is considered illegal speech by the liberals. Say it and you can be accused of being a racist even though the largest percentage of single welfare mothers are white. The congress has a legislation dumbing down effect that we can all see in the proposals they make because few of the real issues that make costs so high are being addressed. The issue of creating more competition by making health care insurance sell-able by any company across state lines is one simple no brainier but when President Obama has all of his fake affect anger against the insurance companies he is always still protecting their exclusive state monopolies by keeping state boundaries in place while otherwise making them out to be the boogieman. We hear about not having enough doctors and medical professionals constantly and yet we see Walmart successfully opening walk in health care clinics with affordable visit fees. Government can just go out and create a medical school out of the blue and run it though a veterans hospital and they could do the same for the nurse shortage. Making the profession tax free works faster and better and increasing availble supply of goods and services on the market but that makes government give up more control which they think is unthinkable. Another law should be that no health care insurance plan should be forced ever to pay for cosmetic or elective surgeries or that these be special plans that cost more for the people who join them. Why? Because it is happening. People who don't smoke or use drugs should be given discounts that they pay back later if they lie on the application or agree to be bounced form the service contract. That would be a reasonable way to cut cost for having good healthy behaviors. Most important is that the health insurance plan that government officials vote to keep for themselves should be available for anyone in the country who can pay the premium for the same plan just so that people know what government officials believe is the proper cost of a health care plan and better yet the government officials should go to Indian reservation clinics, veterans hospitals and other facilities that the government already runs instead of having special perks. The ones that believe in Castro's Cuban plan should go get their medical care down there to prove to the rest of us that they really believe what they are telling parroting from Havana's propaganda department. In Cuba the real cost of the benefits of their health care plan is way higher than reported . The savings probably come from the majority of people there forced to eat beans and rice and live in broken down apartment flats with no air conditioning. Another thing that is lacking completely in the American system is a price menu on the wall at your doctor's office where you can see the quoted price for services that might become necessary so you know in advance whether or not you have insurance. How come there is no law that your bill is not always a big surprise. It would certainly help if the prices were listed at what percentage of each service is necessarily tax free so you don't pay your doctor's income tax for your health needs unnecessarily. The Medicare/ Medicaid rate should also be posted. How come a government that forces food companies to post the ingredients on their products and break down of fats and carbohydrates, salt etc don't want to provide consumers with the same kind of information for their medical care? Those who have higher deductibles probably want to know more than those who have no deductibles. the introduction of a consumer price information would do a lot to make the process transparent. It definitely would be more complicated for a cancer regimen but then medical tourism would then something that could be compared to see if the cost of hotels and flights are negligible in comparison to the savings. These rather simple ideas are not what the media discussions are about and you might wonder why. Some of these issues come up but with a lot of gloss over because endeared special interests don't want real changes and a lot of these special interests are behind some of the most radical changes proposed including public service unions that want to load up your clinics ands hospitals with bureaucrats, lawyers and social workers , as many as possible and big corporations certainly welcome government control of health care because they are sick and tired, for good reason , of being forced to provide for employee health care at higher and higher prices every year . Just because some big corporation with 100 thousand employees wants government to take the premium out of their employees pay checks won't necessarily make it cheaper for anyone in the long run. It is part fantasy that people in these corporations think they still wont be cutting the checks but it also means it comes out of the workers pay check in the accounting and not as a benefit which is not what a lot of workers think is beneficial when they do the math later on. When the company has the deduction it might benefit the company more and the worker because it seems free but once it hits the workers paycheck then it looks to becoming from work funds and depending on what tax hungry government later does may not be deductible. Tax free is better than a tax credit and a tax credit is better than a simple income deduction? Government should come out with a health care bill of rights for patients. Do you see anything like that form Obama or congress or even the republican sideliner shoe tapers? No. Your basic rights should be to have tax free care number 1. The right to know in advance what services you are opting for or which your doctor wants you to have will cost and not on any sliding scale number 2 and number 3, that you have the right to choose your doctor and have as many different second opinions and tests for your health conditions that you want. 4. That if you are in an accident you get into the closest emergency room and the government agrees to compensate facilities for that if your insurance can't pay at a reasonable rate or with tax credits to the hospitals. 5. That you can outsource your health care overseas anywhere you want to with out any Berlin walls. 6.That insurance companies cannot cancel your insurance policy and have to remind you to pay your premium when you are too sick to pay it online. 7 that drug and medical patent holders can have longer to realize the value of their exclusive patents if they agree to lower prices to reasonable levels from the time the product is rolled out to the consumer by allowing goverment officials at the patent office to extend the length of patents in exchange for prices being set lower according to an agreement. 8. That patents have the right to risk their lives taking any experimental treatments they dare to take with sufficient information presented to them of potential risks. 9. Patients with big medical bills should be able to amortize their payments at low monthly affordable payment rates instead of being forced to get loans or go bankrupt. .